My last two normal days weren’t all that normal in that I was in a city far from home watching the unfolding of a new frontier from across an ocean. We had arrived on a Wednesday, we made it to Dublin, we drank coffee, we boarded the plane for Amsterdam. We made it to Amsterdam, on to the train, then the street car, then the Hotel front door. We made it up the stairs and to our room and we never slept at all. We made it to the pub and toasted to our strength. We toasted to this new adventure starting in just one day and we had french fries with all the sauces and the pub had a cat and the cat sat and purred and we smiled in satisfaction and what we had endured and I told Katie how happy and contented I was. That was perhaps my third to last normal day.
We stayed up until 8pm, until we couldn’t take it anymore and we fell asleep after all those hours in the air, on the bus, schlepping our stuff from here to there and back again and six hours in the future. We fell asleep on Wednesday.
We woke up on Thursday to something altogether different. A call from home. A call, and a call and a text and text and a WhatsApp. I was up before Katie. I saw the news and questions. When Katie woke up I said, “I don’t think this will be the day we had hoped it would be.”
We got up, we had breakfast, we packed up our stuff after hours on hold with the airline, and got on the bus to take us back to the airport where we spent the day in line, waiting, in line, hoping, in line asking if there were tickets back home. And there were, and the trip that had started on Tuesday was over by Thursday and they said the earliest they could get us on a plane was Sunday. And we ate our granola bars right there in the terminal and then walked to the bus that took us back to the hotel where we dropped off our stuff and then went to the pub.
With the cat and the beer, and the dark wood and the french fries and we toasted our strength and we toasted our health and there were two days between us and home.
I guess I’m guilty of ignorance, and lack of vigilence. I am guilty of looking around and seeing peace and believing it to be so. Perhaps my last two normal days weren’t supposed to be normal at all, but in my dreaming and in my imagination, I could never imagine a place so lovely and old as Amsterdam to be anything but charming and free. So on my last two normal days I walked in the park and had coffee on a park bench. I admired the bikes and the moms with babies in strollers, the joggers and ducks on the muddy banks and the daffodils green and golden.
We ate at an Indian restaurant and had a drink at an Art Deco hotel. We fell asleep and woke up and made friends with the hotel staff and I wrote in my journal about my last two normal days.
Then, on my last normal day, we got out our guitars in the lobby of the hotel and set up Katie’s ipad. There, in that hotel lobby, for one hour, we made music and it felt wonderful on my last normal day.
Our friends, the hotel staff, listened to our concert and, when it was over, invited us to share a beer. And around a table in an empty hotel we talked like half strangers who, with a little time, may have become friends. Then Katie and I bid them goodbye and we walked down the street like normal to an African restaurant and sat, like normal, at a table for two and shared a meal and we toasted our adventure and our guts and our music and living through the days that weren’t anything like we had hoped them to be.
School was still in session, people were still at their jobs. Fewer families and joggers and dreamers on paths and park benches, but even so we ate croissants and drank coffee and watched the boot camps do push ups and run lines on the edge of a large field and watched the dog owners at the dog park throw stuff so their dogs would run after it. We saw groups of elderly walkers taking in the Saturday morning air and so did we on my last normal day.
On my last normal day I was a friend, a traveler, a mother, a wife, and I was also still a musician.
“I don’t think this will be the day we had hoped it would be.” Since then I’ve cried a lot. I don’t intend to cry much longer. Really, I had the most wonderful, magical last two normal days a girl could ask for.
Once upon a time there was a small village off the shore of a vast ocean. They had been there for generation upon generation and it was their tradition to work on land but to always go home at night to the sea. Each family had a beautiful boat upon which they lived past down to them by their fathers and mothers and made more beautiful with the passing of time and the weathering of wood and the pictures and stories added in carving by each son and daughter year after year.
Some time in the very distant past, they favored the sea over the land because they loved being rocked peacefully to sleep by the gentle current in the harbor. At night you’d see lanterns lit on the edge of the farms and fields and workshops and slowly the lights would converge on to the one path leading to the harbor where all their boats docked.
Not only that, as time went on they believed there was power in the sea that did not exist on land. The waves would whisper to them from their dream sleep and predict the future. On festival days the history of the sea, the magic of the ocean and the legacy of each family were celebrated by grand storytelling and adornment of villagers dressed with the treasures they protected so closely year after year in their hulls and their holds, but never did any of these treasures dwell on land and, while the land was the source of work and bounty, of labor and goodness, for some reason, the villagers were in love with the sea. They were in love with their boats. They were in love with their stories.
Until one day a stranger arrived on foot having crossed the valleys and ridges separating the village from the wilderness.
The stranger came unexpected. No one noticed his arrival until an elder, a boat builder, saw the stranger approaching his workshop yard.
The elder rose from his workbench, walked around his table, made his way to the door as the stranger came near. “How can I help you, Pilgrim?” the elder asked from his threshold.
“I come with a warning, my brother.” the stranger replied.
“The sea. The ocean. The ocean it is changing. A storm is upon us and there’s still time to spare! I’ve seen from the ridge there are boats in the harbor. There are boats where your children and grandmothers dwell. But the ocean, it is changing and the ocean will be your ending and I come bearing warning that survival is your task. I’ve seen it. I know it. I’m living to give warning, the sea is no longer, on your boats in their beauty must you never again lay your heads.
The ocean, the harbor, your history, your treasure, tonight must be untethered and your boats set to sea.
The land, the soil, the oak tree and willow, the granite and river rock will now feed your dreams. Gather your village, by lantern at sundown, you must heed my warning or by dawn comes your death.”
The elder, a boat builder, looked out on the horizon, the sky was a color of mustard and swordfish and black. The elder, a wise man, took heed of the stranger and when the lanterns in the workshops and fields and rivers were lit, he lead the march homeward with the men, women and children and with lanterns they stood on the edge of the shore. Their homes and their treasures, their stories and time measured in elaborate carving from their bows to their sterns, as the sea began stirring and the wind did its howling, each father and mother spoke not a word.
Silently, solemnly, for the sake of the future, with lantern in hand they untied the ropes, unwinding and pulling with the help of their neighbors until freed from the dock, they finally let their boats go.
One by one in the twilight, drifting off to the horizon as the ocean grew angry and then swallowed each vessel whole, the villagers stood huddled and weeping til the dawn when, from dreaming, upon the land, they arose.